After all the rushing around in Siem Reap and Angkor Wat we were both excited to laze about in the sleepy city of Battambang. We decided to make a stop here on our way back to the Thai border because we heard it is the best place to get a sense of the actual state of a healing Cambodia and the changes and modernization that the people face across the country. While Pnom Phen is rapidly modernizing and being developed, it is a pocket of quickly changing culture in a country that is changing much more slowly, and Siem Reap has been vastly changed by endless tourism because of Angkor Wat, Battambang does not get many tourists and is developing at a sleepy pace comparatively. And for those of you wondering, no, we were not Pnom Phen when the stampede occurred on the night of the Loy Krathong festival killing 360 people. We were celebrating Loy Krathong in Bangkok by then. We do know of a few fellow travelers that were planning to celebrate there and have already heard from one of them who is fine, but was only 100 meters from the chaos. We have yet to hear from a few others, we are hoping they are ok.
Battambang was an interesting blend of old and new, with many restored old French colonial buildings, shanty town-style architecture with stapled corrugated iron patches, as well as a few very new-looking, modern buildings such as the new mall that has yet to open. You can also see the blend of old and new in the daily rush of the people and visually see the divide between the haves and the have-nots. Some drive sparkly modern cars and wear modern clothes and some are on rickety old motorbikes or rusted, ancient trucks and wear dirty clothes with holes in them. The majority of Cambodian people still live in the countryside and are peasant farmers. It seems that many of these people come into the cities to sell their grains, fruits, veggies, meats and fish or handmade wares. Others seem to live in the main part of the city and work within the city infrastructure or in retail/wholesale, they are bankers or shop owners. We saw very few tourists compared to everywhere else we have been and enjoyed the slower pace of the pretty city.
We spent hours at a small second story café called Gecko Café. They are focused on social equity and provide well-paid jobs to underprivileged youth. This made the food a bit more expensive for us, but we were served by glowing, happy, eager to please, young people, who were clearly healthy and are treated well at work. Also, rare in Cambodia, they actually make enough to piece together a comfortable living.
We walked around the city one day, we bought some sculptures from a shop where the shop owner was actually the artist as well. We were able to watch her carve part of a huge, gloriously intricate sculpture of a war scene of some sort with a backdrop of a swirling sea full of fish and dragons. We walked by a small river flanked by trees and pretty walkways. We walked around the big central market of Battambang, which is NOT a tourist market. There were women hand stitching and selling intricate, brightly colored, sequined dresses and shirts that we guessed were for parties or ceremonies as we saw no one wearing this style of clothing in all of Cambodia. There were also endless stalls of western-style clothes, but more from the 90’s than this decade.
The most interesting thing we did in Battambang was go to an art gallery and “Circus Show” at a French supported, children’s art school called Phare Ponleu Selpak (PPS). It was an unexpectedly inspirational experience as PPS is a Cambodian NGO that uses art to answer children’s psycho social needs. The school had expanded over the years to include a free school for holistic education and sees over 1400 children daily. They also rescue and house children that have been sexually trafficked. They house or help 70 children that have met this sad fate. We started the evening wandering around their art gallery looking at the powerful art that the students had created and fell in love with a piece and bought it, thus supporting the child/young adult who created it and the school directly. Many of the students of PPS go on to have careers in visual or performing arts. We discovered that the student who had painted the picture we purchased was a trafficked child rescued by the school at 12 and stayed until he was 18 and is now working as an artist and computer graphics designer in China! After the gallery show we saw a performance art piece (the “circus”). It was about the Kmer Rouge regime and was performed by 8 strong young male actors/acrobats. It was gut wrenchingly beautiful and powerful, with no words spoken during the entire performance. It was also a delightfully modern artistic endeavor. We were both very impressed that this school is able to provide the world with Cambodian artists and performers who are unafraid to venture forth with their art despite the fact that just 20 years earlier, Cambodian artists lived in fear of the Kmer Rouge who killed artists and performers for fear of the dissident ideas they carry forth. To us the school represents the promising future of Cambodia and the resilience of her amazing people.
We didn’t do much in Battambang and started to realize how tired we were from going going going for the past 7 weeks. All that’s left is a second stint in Bangkok and a day in Hong Kong on our way home…
Love,
Devon and Breen
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